Patronage

I had a curious and somewhat short-winded conversation just now over lunch with a professor of mine at Stanford who is a prominent patron of the arts and teaches a class on the management of non-profit organizations at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

We were discussing patronage of the arts — that is, patronage in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Y’know, the rich and powerful individuals in days of yore like the Medicis, the Duke of York and the heads of the Catholic Church who would back artists like Shakespeare and Michelangelo as a means of showing off their wealth and political acumen.

These days, the work of sponsoring the arts has fallen largely to charitable foundations, and it strikes me that there’s less of a direct link between patron and artist than there used to be, with foundation middlemen performing detailed processes in order to ascertain how to spend a collection of rich individuals’ money or the money of an specific family or individual.

The professor pointed out an obvious point: That the nonexistence of the old style of patronage in this country is due for the most part to the fact that givers can only get tax breaks by sponsoring non-profit organizations rather than individual artists.

I’m not advocating for the old system, where not paying proper homage to a patron could get an artist cut off, jailed or worse. But for some strange reason, I do feel a vague nostalgia for the old way. All those odes written in honor of haughty Queens; and all the frescoed saints with more than a passing resemblance to the people who carried the purse strings.

The contract between artist and patron was much more explicit in Renaissance times. These days, the relationship seems quite faceless and corporate. Which in many ways, I suppose, is a good thing. Thank goodness that poets don’t feel the need to write odes about the program officers at the Hewlett Foundation.

Finally: Does anyone out there know of any good books on the history of arts patronage? I’d love to read something excellent on the subject.

Chloe Veltman

...is the Senior Arts Editor at KQED (www.kqed.org), one of the U.S.'s most prominent public media organizations. Chloe returns to the Bay Area following two years as Arts Editor at Colorado Public Radio (www.cpr.org), where she was tapped to launch and lead the state-wide public media organization's first ever multimedia culture bureau. A former John S. Knight Journalism Fellow (2011-2012) and Humanities Center Fellow (2012-2013) at Stanford University, Chloe has contributed reporting and criticism to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, BBC Classical Music Magazine, American Theatre Magazine, WQXR and many other media outlets. Chloe was also the host and executive producer of VoiceBox, a syndicated, weekly public radio and podcast series all about the art of the human voice (www.voicebox-media.org), which ran for four years between 2009 and 2013. Her study about the evolution of singing culture in the U.S. is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Check out Chloe's website at www.chloeveltman.com and connect with her on Twitter via @chloeveltman. [Read More …]

lies like truth

These days, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fantasy. As Alan Bennett's doollally headmaster in Forty Years On astutely puts it, "What is truth and what is fable? Where is Ruth and where is Mabel?" It is one of the main tasks of this blog to celebrate the confusion through thinking about art and perhaps, on occasion, attempt to unpick the knot. [Read More...]